club The Great Reading Thread of 2024

[Sea-to-sky]

If anyone wants a free book they are giving away fixed on you by laurelin paige on amazon at the moment. 
very good book with very twisty plot, but read the triggers as it will not be for everyone. 

[Scaly Freak]

Dracula Daily starts in two weeks. The project describes itself like this, on their website:

 

Quote

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel - it’s made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings - and every part of it has a date. The whole story happens between May 3 and November 7. So: Dracula Daily will post a newsletter each day that something happens to the characters, in the same timeline that it happens to them.

 

Now you can read the book via email, in small digestible chunks - as it happens to the characters.

 

 

Sign-up available here: https://draculadaily.substack.com/about

[ViperN7]

11 hours ago, Scaly Freak said:

Dracula Daily starts in two weeks. The project describes itself like this, on their website:

What a cool concept!

[MaeradCase]

16 hours ago, Scaly Freak said:

Dracula Daily starts in two weeks. The project describes itself like this, on their website:

 

 

Sign-up available here: https://draculadaily.substack.com/about

I have so many unread emails from last year's... 😅

[ViperN7]

On 1/2/2024 at 10:15 AM, Artemis Prime said:

On that topic, my dad likes historical fiction, but he prefers it to be very light on the fiction and very heavy on the historical accuracy. If anyone has recommendations that fit that criteria, send them my way, please!

 

Thank you @Artemis Prime for giving me the push I needed to finally undertake a quest that has been simmering in the back of my mind for a couple years. 

You see, I used to keep a list of all the books I'd read. I started the list in my early teenage years (backfilled everything I could remember) and continued until college. It was 10 handwritten pages. 

In college I abruptly stopped reading other things as suddenly I was overflowing with class reading. 

 

One of the changes I made during lockdown was reading more again--it started as getting ebooks out of my library, because that was something I could access when everything was shut down. I've been thinking for a few years about restarting the Books Read list----but I no longer know where the original is, and the thought of trying to recreate it all was daunting. 

 

When I saw this question ⬆️ I started trying to remember the historical fiction books I've read, and once I started dredging up the past, the floodgates opened and I've been working on my Books Read list for 3 months. It's on to the 15th typed page and still going. 

 

What kind of stories does your dad like to read? Topics/age of protagonist? War stories? Social critique stories? Something more like realistic fiction, just in the past? Does it matter if it's suuuuuuper depressing? How does he feel about nonfiction? 

It really depends on the kind of story your dad likes to read, but here are some options that might fit your dad's criteria: 

 

+The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain 

+To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 

+The Devil's Arithmatic by Jane Yolen 

 

+Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (contemporary to the time it was written) 

+The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (contemporary to the time it was written)

+Pygmalion  by George Bernard Shaw (contemporary to the time it was written)

 

+When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka (novelization based on true events) 

+Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell (novelization based on true events)

 

+The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien  (more of a novelized memoir, based on the author's experience in the Vietnam War)

 

+Night by Elie Wiesel (memoir; Holocaust)

+The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (memoir; WWII)

[sarakingdom]

On 4/20/2024 at 11:59 PM, Scaly Freak said:

Dracula Daily starts in two weeks. The project describes itself like this, on their website:

 

How much does it reorder the book from narrative order to chronological order? I have in fact not read the book itself yet, but this may not be the ideal way to start.

[MaeradCase]

25 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

How much does it reorder the book from narrative order to chronological order? I have in fact not read the book itself yet, but this may not be the ideal way to start.

I believe the reason they came up with the concept is that the book is presented as a series of events with timetables and journal entries and newspaper clippings. So I believe it's a fully linear timeline, and not squiggly. (I only made it in a handful of entries before I started ignoring the emails... 😅 Oops)

[Artemis Prime]

34 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

How much does it reorder the book from narrative order to chronological order? I have in fact not read the book itself yet, but this may not be the ideal way to start.

No reordering at all, just divided up into smaller chunks. It goes based on the date of the epistolary content, so if a diary entry covers multiple days, it sends it to you on the date that the entry was written, which is the same way the novel is organized, so nothing needs moved around. I love Dracula Daily, but didn't get very far with it last year because I don't check my email all the time, so this year I have the coffee table book version which I'm very excited about.

[Scaly Freak]

12 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

How much does it reorder the book from narrative order to chronological order? I have in fact not read the book itself yet, but this may not be the ideal way to start.

 

What Artemis and Maerad said.  

 

The original novel is presented as a series of letters and diary entries, all clearly dated. Almost all of them are presented by Bram Stoker in the order of events/dates, but there is a flashback of several weeks half-way through, that the Dracula Daily project break out from Stoker's edited timeline and insert in the order the events take place chronologically. Singing up for the mailing list means the date of every letter or dairy entry, we get an email with that content. I really enjoyed it last year, however, due to being laid off and everything that came from that I was distracted and lost track of the story and emails. I'm looking forward to picking up the story again this year.

[ViperN7]

I finally finished the Chinese language kids' book I was reading! It took way longer than I expected, but I did it! I think I'll be practicing the new vocab for a while before I pick another project. 

[Sea-to-sky]

There is a humungous book and ebook sale on amazon today, just incase anyone is watching pennies but still wants new books. Some good titles on there for 0.99p